Tag: Peter Tonguette

PICTURES OF LOSS: HEREAFTER, directed by Clint Eastwood

PICTURES OF LOSS: HEREAFTER, directed by Clint Eastwood

null

EDITOR'S NOTE: We are proud to present an unusual and personal series of articles by critic Peter Tonguette about grief and mourning on film, and how certain moviegoing experiences affected him in the aftermath of his father's death. Peter's series includes pieces on Hereafter, The Darjeeling Limited, Running on Empty, Men Don't Leave and A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries. If you would like to read the introduction to this series, click here. If you would like to read Pictures of Loss: The Darjeeling Limited, click here. If you would like to read Pictures of Loss: Running On Empty, click here. If you would like to read Pictures of Loss: Men Don't Leave, click here. If you would like to read Pictures of Loss: A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries, click here.— — Matt Zoller Seitz

Joan Didion says, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” In the months after my father died, the story I told myself was that I could write as I always had, about movies and movie directors, and that this would, in fact, serve as a useful distraction from my grief. I was certain that my professionalism would see me through this terrible time.

Most would call it denial.

Soon enough, I found that I couldn’t sit for most movies, and the last thing I wanted to do was write about them. The only words that mattered now—that my father haddied—were the words I could not bring myself to write. I suspect the same is true in the aftermath of any catastrophic event. To write of anything else feels trivial; what could possibly take precedence over the catastrophe? Yet to write about the catastrophe itself is just too difficult.

I managed to do a few interviews for the book I was finishing and a handful of magazine assignments, which I eagerly accepted before finding that my usual dedication and focus had forsaken me. I tried everything, including reminding myself that my father would want me to proceed apace with my career. In hindsight, my putting the matter that way—which I did on more than one occasion—seems telling. If I was so certain about continuing to write about movies, why would I even raise the possibility of stopping?

Eventually, I was nudged back to work by the prospect of collaborating with a friend on a small editing project. The friendship was more helpful to me than the work, which was not particularly creative, but it was a start. Since I hadn’t worked on a consistent basis in months, I regarded the project as a challenge and was eager to do well. Because I had a
partner in crime, and because she was a friend, I had no choice but to hold up my end of the bargain.

The exercise was a turning point. I began to write again in earnest, but ever so slowly, and only gradually did it dawn on me that I had a book to finish, that there were people in this world who actually wanted me to write for them. But what allowed me to see it through to completion, I realize now, was not the professionalism I imagined I possessed or the pressure of not wanting to disappoint a good friend.
null
My book was about the late filmmaker James Bridges, whose films were often about the heartache of losing a loved one. This is certainly the theme of his best film, September 30, 1955, which stars Richard Thomas as a college student in Arkansas who is bereft at the death of his idol James Dean. Long before my father’s death, I had made voluminous notes about the film, but as I marshaled them into a manuscript, I found that I was obsessed by it. “Death is never far in Bridges’s films,” I wrote, and it wasn’t far from my mind as I typed those words. At first, I did not know why I dwelt so intensely on September 30, 1955. I’m sure I was convinced I did so because it was “among the very greatest of American films of the 1970s.”

But something else was afoot.

I found myself relating to the grief of the Richard Thomas character in a very personal way. I understood his sorrow—and I bickered with it, too. He lost a movie star, not a parent or a family member or a friend. He should know better, though I myself hadn’t always known better. As a teenager, I was always very affected by the death of a public figure I admired, like Stanley Kubrick. Yet when J.D. Salinger died several weeks after I lost my father, I was very sorry, but not devastated.

I watched and re-watched September 30, 1955, and the words poured forth, but I was still unaware of the reason why. So I didn’t seek out other films that gave me the jolt it had.

Instead, they seemed to find me.

One night, I was working in my room when someone decided to put in a DVD of Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter. I used to love Eastwood’s films. I was the sort of person who considered Bronco Billy to be a masterpiece. I saw Mystic River three times when it was first released in theatres. In my present state, however, keeping up with Eastwood was low on my list of priorities. I’m sure I thought, “Why bother? What difference does it make if it’s any good or not?” But as the film started, I caught myself turning to watch every few minutes. A snippet of dialogue would intrigue me. An overheard moment would pull me in. I glimpsed a scene here, a scene there, and I found it harder and harder to turn away. I soon left my work and moved to a chair closer to the TV. The film did more than command my attention. I was—literally—being drawn in by it.
null
In Hereafter, Matt Damon plays George Lonegan, a psychic who does not wish do be a psychic. It is one of Damon’s best performances. Even though he declines to help many sad, desperate people who feel they can benefit from his gift, he always retains sympathy for the grief-stricken amongst us, a reflection of Eastwood’s own compassionate perspective.

Has the director ever filmed a moment as heartrending as when a British youngster named Marcus (whose twin brother Jason has died in an accident) looks to his sibling’s empty bed and says, “Goodnight, Jas”?

Obsessed with communicating with his brother, Marcus learns of George and tracks him
down when George serendipitously makes a trip to London. Marcus wants him to do a reading, but the answer is—predictably—no. “I don’t do that anymore,” he insists in a huff. But Marcus will not give up that easily and proceeds to stake himself outside of George’s hotel room all day. George’s basic decency finally gets the better of him, as he invites Marcus inside. He begins by asking Marcus a stream of questions, with Marcus either answering or nodding his head yes to each. “Someone close to you has passed away… A male… He was young when he died… Is this person your brother? Older brother? But not by much, he says. Only by a few minutes… I’m sorry, kid.”

Because we have seen Marcus and Jason’s story unfold, we know that everything George says is true. Because George has only just met Marcus, we also know that his psychic abilities are therefore real.
null
It turns out that Eastwood’s attitude toward the supernatural is as matter-of-fact as his screen persona. He seems to have followed the suggestion of the poet and novelist Robert Graves, who once wrote that “one should accept ghosts very much as one accepts fire—a more common but equally mysterious phenomenon.” In Hereafter, Eastwood accepts George’s abilities much as Graves accepted ghosts and fire: at face value. For example, when George is pestered into doing a reading by a young woman he has a romanticinterest in (played by Bryce Dallas Howard), he relays a message from her deceased father that is greatly upsetting to her, thus ending their nascent relationship. Why would George do this unless he really was psychic? After all, from his perspective, would it not have made more sense to tell the woman something she wanted to hear?

Rilke wrote the line “Who says that all must vanish?” in a different context, but it is easy to imagine Eastwood and screenwriter Peter Morgan asking it of us, as they confidently but casually assert that loved ones are still here, somehow, even after they seem gone. My favorite moment in Hereafter comes when George tours the London home of Charles Dickens (his favorite author). He pauses to admire the painting “Dickens’s Dream,” which, it is explained by a tour guide, shows a dozing Dickens surrounded by “characters from his novels floating in the air around him.” The description beautifully anticipates the way George says Jason describes the afterlife to him: “The weightlessness. He says that’s cool.”

Not since Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust has the work of Charles Dickens been referenced to such powerful effect.
null
Even though Hereafter is about death and near-death, I didn’t find it grim. Just the opposite. I remembered the strange truth of what Stanley Kubrick told Stephen King when he was about to make The Shining into a movie: “Well, the concept of the ghost presupposes life after death. That’s a cheerful concept, isn’t it?” There isn’t a single character in Hereafter who I would call cheerful, yet Marcus walks away from his session with George with the reassurance he has been seeking. “If you’re worried about being on your own, don’t be,” his brother communicates to him, through George. “You’re not. Because he is you and you are him. One cell. One person. Always.”

If we must suspend disbelief to fully share in Marcus’s solace at hearing those words, let us remind ourselves that we are in good company. At the end of his final film, Family Plot, Hitchcock allows a fake psychic (Barbara Harris) to demonstrate authentic telepathic abilities. “Blanche, you did it! You are psychic!” her husband (Bruce Dern) exclaims, as if imitating Hitchcock’s own incredulousness. But it’s true—she is!

Of course I loved Hereafter: here was a film that expressed not only my pain but also to my most basic, private wish, the same wish expressed by the son who loses his father in Paul Brickman’s Men Don’t Leave (discussed later this week): “I want to see him again. One more time.”

Peter Tonguette is the author of Orson Welles Remembered and The Films of James Bridges. He is currently writing a critical study of the films of Peter Bogdanovich for the University Press of Kentucky and editing a collection of interviews with Bogdanovich for the University Press of Mississippi. You can visit Peter's website here.

PICTURES OF LOSS: Introduction

PICTURES OF LOSS: Introduction

null


EDITOR'S NOTE: We are proud to present an unusual and personal series of articles by critic Peter Tonguette about grief and mourning on film, and how certain moviegoing experiences affected him in the aftermath of his father's death. Peter's series includes pieces on Hereafter, The Darjeeling Limited, Running on Empty, Men Don't Leave and A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries. If you would like to read part 1 of the series, Pictures of Loss: Hereafter, click here. If you would like to read Pictures of Loss: The Darjeeling Limited, click here. If you would like to read Pictures of Loss: Running On Empty, click here.  If you would like to read Pictures of Loss: Men Don't Leave, click here. If you would like to read Pictures of Loss: A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries, click here.—— Matt Zoller Seitz

Ever since I began writing professionally about film, my father nearly always read what I wrote. Yet it was only recently that it hit me: Before he died in January of 2010, the last article he read by me concerned the death of a parent, and most of the films I have thought to write about since then concern losses like my own.
null
My article was about a new memoir by Orson Welles’s eldest daughter, Chris, whom I interviewed for the occasion. If I made a point to emphasize how much of her book had to do with a daughter missing her father—I referred to its “preoccupation with filial matters” and “sometimes sorrowful tone”—perhaps it was because Welles, who was a distracted, often incommunicado father, died at seventy.

Seventy: an age I considered not at all elderly.

Seventy: only two years younger than my father was when I wrote (and he read) my article.

Yet as I reread it now, so much about it rings so hollow. When I wrote it, I didn’t know the first thing about losing a parent, as Chris Welles did, as Orson Welles did. (By the time he was a teenager, both of his parents had died.) “Filial matters”? A fancy phrase, but little more.

I wish I could go back and rewrite my article. I wish I could go back and re-ask my questions of Chris. Of course, what I really wish is that I could return to my former state of ignorance. That would mean that my father was here again and, as before, I could only guess at what losing him would feel like.

As my father read my article about Chris Welles, I am certain that he did not for one moment place himself in the shoes of the lost parent, any more than I did the bereaved child. My father’s death was sudden and unexpected. Yet for this to have been the last thing of mine that he read is an inescapable irony. I’ve come to think of it as my unknowing goodbye to him. Yes, my words were written in innocence of my subject, and yes, they seem dreadfully stilted to me now.

But aren’t goodbyes always innocent, always stilted?

After my father died, my interest in movies—and in writing about them, too—went on vacation. For a long time, I thought it was a permanent vacation. Gradually, though, I found myself drawn back to movies, but they were always movies about grief and I always happened upon them by accident. Like the accident of my being in the middle of writing a book about a filmmaker (James Bridges) who made a lot of movies about the sorrow of losing a loved one. Or like the accident of being in a room when a movie about the living trying to communicate with the dead (Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter) was playing on television.

Were these things really accidents? There was the time I went to a screening of Bergman’s Persona and a trailer for Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death preceded the feature attraction. The trailer introduced the film by way of excerpting the astonishing opening scene: As RAF pilot David Niven is hurtling toward his death, he falls in love with Kim Hunter, the American radio operator communicating with him in his final minutes. I had not thought about A Matter of Life and Death in years and years, and I had not gone to Persona to think about matters of life and death. But for the next 90 minutes, as Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson were talking in Swedish, I could think of nothing but it, about the indomitability of love and the utter waste of death.

The poet Meghan O’Rourke, author of the extraordinary memoir The Long Goodbye (which I will return to throughout the pieces in this series), has talked about finding more solace in literature than in self-help books after her mother died. She said she experienced a “shock of recognition” when she re-read Hamlet and it dawned on her that the play was really about a young person in mourning, not unlike herself. Eventually, I, too, found it helpful to ponder my feelings through a work of fiction, to experience the anguish and loneliness of loss vicariously, through characters on a movie screen or television set.

I think of William Blake, who wrote:

“Can I see another’s woe,
And not be in sorrow too?”

And James Baldwin, who said:

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”

Or in my case: But then you see.

One afternoon in the summer I was seventeen, I was in a restaurant with my parents and younger brother. We were not celebrating any particular occasion and the meal itself was completely unmemorable. But I’ve never forgotten what I saw. Directly across from me, not visible to anyone else, was a middle-aged woman sitting in a booth by herself. As she tentatively nursed a Coca-Cola, a song was playing on the radio. I couldn’t possibly say what it was, but it was not unlike, say, the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows.” It had that same poignant feeling to it. As the woman sat there, her eyes downcast, she began mouthing the sad words of the sad song. She didn’t appear to be mentally ill or disturbed in any way. Something had simply gone wrong for her. How was I to know? Who was I to guess?

It was like the scene in Magnolia (a movie I don’t care for) when the characters sing along to Aimee Mann’s “Wise Up,” except that it actually affected me.

I remember feeling such great pity for her that it spoiled the rest of my day. I feel less sorry for the woman than I used to it is because I am now in her shoes, looking to pop culture to give voice to my pain, and I wouldn’t want people to think I’m feeling sorry for myself.

Meghan O’Rourke begins her memoir with an epigraph from a novel by Iris Murdoch called An Accidental Man: “The bereaved cannot communicate with the unbereaved.” Perhaps, going forward, I am only able to communicate with bereaved movies. I no longer love films only for their graceful direction or witty dialogue, for their mise-en-scene or montage. For a film to reach me, it must speak to my loss, as the films examined in this series do. Hereafter. The Darjeeling Limited. Running on Empty. Men Don’t Leave. A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries. There are so many others. I found that I needed them at a time when I thought I was beyond needing movies.

I was wrong.

For Alexandra Asher Sears, who read and encouraged.

Peter Tonguette is the author of Orson Welles Remembered and The Films of James Bridges. He is currently writing a critical study of the films of Peter Bogdanovich for the University Press of Kentucky and editing a collection of interviews with Bogdanovich for the University Press of Mississippi. You can visit Peter's website here.